


Salroka

by AuditoryCheesecake



Series: A Cheesecake's Tumblr Shorts [18]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Adoribull - Freeform, Canon-Typical Violence, Darkspawn, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Body Horror, The Blight, The Deep Roads Suck A Lot, The Descent DLC, but at least they have each other, implied minor character death, nobody is happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-03
Updated: 2016-10-03
Packaged: 2018-08-19 08:54:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8198959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuditoryCheesecake/pseuds/AuditoryCheesecake
Summary: The Deep Roads are an excellent place for dark contemplation. Luckily, the Iron Bull gives equally excellent hugs.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Salroka: Dwarven, meaning "Friend". Most commonly used by the casteless. Literally means "one at my side".

“Y’know,” said Varric.

“That you don’t like caves?” Dorian responded acidly. “Yes, I believe you may have mentioned it.”

Adaar could have chosen a worse group to take into the Deep Roads. Maybe. If she’d tried particularly hard.

For Varric, it was lack of time– without the sun, what was a day?– and being underground in general. And dwarves. For Bull, it was low ceilings and close passageways and dark caverns where he couldn’t tell friend from foe. For Dorian, it was the vast, echoing, uncharted chasms they crossed on woefully narrow bridges, and the darkspawn.

Above ground, Dorian got some grim satisfaction from killing darkspawn. There was a sense of accomplishment, in sealing their tunnels, and of revenge, in setting ablaze the creatures that had stolen his friend.

It seemed like all the living things in the Deep Roads thrived off of death: the darkspawn, obviously, were almost tiresome in their endless hunger for the suffering and blood of the living. The nightmare that was red lyrium had come crawling up from here as well. 

Varric reminded them of that often. He seemed to dwell on it as much as Dorian dwelt on the darkspawn.

At least he could shoot the darkspawn in the head when they came around the corner. It was harder to fight a stone.

Dorian managed to lay down a fire mine after the first few hurlocks materialized. The explosion when their fellows stepped on it rocketed around the enclosed space of the cave, the burst of light disorienting to them all briefly. Bull recovered first and cleaved a genlock from its legs. 

Adaar stabbed the tallest hurlock through the back of its skull, spattering blood across her face. Dorian saw a fleck of it wet and shining against her lip, and his stomach turned in fear and horror. 

This pack was soon dealt with, but they were a ceaseless tide of death and despair, snarling face after barbed arrow after ogre. He cleaned viscera from his staff blade and didn’t feel like he’d made a difference. There was only the promise of more of them, from deeper down, and the fear that he, or someone else he loved, would fall prey to them next. He couldn’t decide which would be worse, but it didn’t stop him from wondering. 

It made for a diverting thought exercise as they trudged through miles of indistinguishable tunnels. No one was much in the mood for talking, other than Shaper Valta. Darkspawn attacks were the main entertainment.

He learned too much about underground flora. Even the mushrooms here grew from the carcasses of spiders. Did the spores quicken their deaths? Was he breathing them now? If he didn’t die by the blade of a hurlock, would his corpse be a nursery, the next stage in their life cycle?

There were the Legion dwarves as well, who saw themselves as dead. Terrible conversationalists. 

They were all orders and shouting– “get behind that emissary!” “Don’t let the ogre grab you!” “What sort of mage hasn’t got a any nugshit healing spells?”

He’d certainly like to heal them, and more importantly Adaar, as she struggled weakly in the ogre’s grasp, daggers not breaking the skin of its hand. He settled for a bolt of flame into the beast’s eye.

It screamed and dropped her, clapping its massive hands over its face. He ran to her, did his best with the dregs of his magic and a healing potion, as Bull severed its hamstrings and the Legion swarmed it.

He chugged a lyrium draught and struggled to his feet, raising hurlock corpses with him, to defend Adaar as another wave of darkspawn approached.

It made him feel like just another necrophage– was he more like the darkspawn or the mushrooms? Was he feeding off the dead or was he one of them? Or was he something else all together, a walking host for the despair and rage that had followed him here, the question not “if” but “which” and “when.”

They’d been underground four days when it finally became unbearable.

There was precious little privacy in the camps. With no wind or rain to shelter from, they had no need of tents. They all ate and even slept in their armor, removing only heavy plate and pieces that needed cleaning.

Dorian did not learn the boy’s name. He wasn’t truly a child, but he sounded so young. The youngest among them, perhaps Sera’s age. What could he have done to be condemned to this? Certainly he was not older than Felix had ever lived to be.

Maker’s mercy, the boy was dying on the other side of the camp and all Dorian could think about was his own selfish pain. 

He sounded so small, so afraid. The Blight was in him, eating him like a parasite. He was as good as dead, already dead to whatever family he’d left in Orzammar. What if he’d had a sweetheart, Dorian wondered. What if he’d had a brother? What if he was someone’s Felix and they didn’t even know they were losing him?

He left the camp, and walked as far as he felt safe out of sight around a corner. The firelight flickered, casting twisted moving shadows on the distant wall of the cave. How could there be so much open space below the earth? How could he descend below the ground and still be able to fall?

Movement startled him, heart leaping to his throat, fire to his fingertips. But it was only Bull. Dorian hadn’t seen his face in some time, hidden behind that helmet of his. Bull was different when he wore it, Dorian felt. More a weapon, less a person. Less _his_ Bull, soft and kind and intelligent.

He went quickly to Bull’s arms, sagged against him with bone-deep relief. He felt like he hadn’t been touched in months. All they’d been doing was killing. Fight, eat, sleep, wake and fight again. It was tiring to the soul as well as the body. Bull’s arms kept the darkness a little further away.

They stood silently together for some indeterminable amount of time. The boy cried out loudly again, and then was quiet. Not dead, Dorian thought. Just tired of the pain.

He breathed shakily, felt Bull’s breath enter and leave his body in a matching rhythm. They did not talk, but Bull’s hand stroked slowly up and down his back, soothing him. His cheek rested against Bull’s chest, and the sound of his heart beating, strong and solid, was as comforting as the touch.

He was a bulwark, a shield against the despair. As long as he had Bull he could take what the world threw at him, he could survive. He’d moved past the point of that scaring him sometime while they’d been down here. Nothing like endless death to put one’s life into perspective.

Putting his heart in Bull’s hands was no more dangerous and no more avoidable than dealing with the demons who came to his dreams. He could not leave Bull any more than he could leave the Inquisition. He needed, and was needed in return.

They sat, eventually, on the rocky ground– or was it a floor? Dorian could never decide– and Bull gathered him more fully into his arms. He rested his chin on Dorian’s shoulder, tucked Dorian’s head against him with one gentle hand moving through his hair.

“That last fight,” Bull said after a very long time. His voice was small and tired. “When that ogre grabbed Adaar like that.”

Dorian leaned against him and listened. It was a rare day when Bull talked like this unprompted.

“I thought that was it. I take the hits and hit them back harder, but she’s… fragile, compared to me. And if she dies… well, the whole world’s fucked, probably. But me in particular. No Qun to go back to, no one wants a bodyguard who’s failed– Adaar, the Inquisition, it’s given me a new purpose. Don’t know what I’d do without that.”

He turned his face back into Dorian’s shoulder, hiding.

“Feels wrong, thinking about myself first. There’s much bigger crap out there than my feelings.”

“I think you’re being quite reasonable, actually.” He felt Bull’s small almost-laughter. “But you’ve forgotten something.”

“If Adaar dies down here the Legion will try to conscript us?”

“That’s the Wardens, and no. If Adaar dies, you’ll still have me. We’ll collect the Chargers, and fuck off into some forgotten corner of the Anderfels, and start a farm.”

“Yeah?” Bull’s voice held a hint of a smile. Ridiculous fantasies always cheered him up, though usually Dorian limited their scope to the bedroom. “Druffalo farm or plants and shit?”

“Why not both? I’ve heard druffalo manure is an excellent fertilizer. We’ll grow prize-winning squash and only fight demons in our spare time.”

“You’re one weird Vint, Dorian.”

“I’m your weird Vint, thank you very much.”

“This you’re way of saying I’m being too dark? I’ll be alright after I sleep a bit, probably.”

Dorian pressed a soft kiss to one of Bull’s scars. “You don’t need to be alright, you know. I’m not.” It was easier to say in the dark, to the shape and feel of Bull, rather than to his face.

Bull’s hand was a warm weight on his upper back, his lips soft against Dorian’s skin. “We can get Boss to stop at a chantry when we’re topside again, light a candle for Felix.”

“There you go again, with that abominable kindness of yours,” Dorian groused. “Thank you.”

He was pulled closer against Bull’s chest. “Gotta take care of my weird Vint, you know. Don’t know where I’d find another like him.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [tumblr!](http://acheesecakewrites.tumblr.com)


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